The Last Petals
by Cavenagh Road
Summary: For here the lover and killer are mingled who had one body and one heart." - Vergissmeinnicht, Keith Douglas. (Post-OotP DGH) Sometimes darkness is closer than you might think.


A/N: Obviously, I do not own Harry Potter -- JK Rowling does. Neither can I, then, be earning any profit whatsoever from the writing of this fic, so please do not sue. Thanks. ;)

Other works by other creative persons have been so credited.

Prologue:

They Know Not

_meus -a -um my, mine_

Things seem so much better when they're not a part of your close surroundings.  
Like words in a letter sent,  
amplified by the distance.  
Possibilities and sweeter dreams,  
sights and sounds calling from far away.

- _Singing Softly to Me_, Kings of Convenience

6th June 1996

When her hand slips around the cut edge of the white marble, and she feels the sharp roughness of it, she is suddenly chillingly struck that all this is real.

Someone she knew, she thinks, and abruptly she is shocked by herself. Someone she knows, knows, not knew, never knew -- and that someone is Sirius -- is dead.

Somehow she can't quite get her half-severed lips to close fully. She knows she must resemble some kind of goldfish; she has been vaguely aware of going around like this for quite some time. Sure, she has been able to get along with the others, talking, laughing, glaring at Michael, smiling at her mother and her father and Luna and Colin and Ron and Hermione, but somehow...if she has a mirror now, she knows she will see wide brown eyes and a partially open mouth, not quite recovering from a horror of some sort. There is a faint tingling in her ears, like the soft, insidious note from a tuning fork.

She hasn't been able to cry yet.

She must surely be a cold person, because there has been somewhat a delayed reaction to What Had Happened, that is, Sirius's Death. She has to think it out in her head, in capitals, because even now she is somehow still wondering vaguely if all this is a very ridiculous joke gone sour. Somehow it feels as if Sirius's Death cannot have happened, not when she has eaten her breakfast -- cornflakes with milk, and sausages, and eggs, and orange juice -- this morning.

The image still strikes her with frightening clarity -- Sirius falling, just as Bellatrix Lestrange struck him with a spell.

He didn't know what hit him, Ginny suddenly thinks, and an irrational bubble of amusement escapes in her heart.

Her fingers feel very cold, although the air is stifling in the summer heat. Her skin is tight around her cheeks.

She feels the cold touch of metal and stone against her chest, and is suddenly very afraid of her own humanity.

"Ginny," a voice calls to her. It sounds like it is on a knife's edge, close to breaking. Harry. "It's just about time to go back."

She turns around. It is Harry, and he is standing just a bit in front of the others, swimming into her technicolour vision, like a character in a movie whose colours have been adjusted to be overly bright. His green eyes are overbright. Ginny blinks.

"Gin." His voice is breaking now, and even as he reaches a hand towards her she watches him with an almost numb horror. "Let's go, okay?"

Her voice just manages to come through her throat.

"Yes, okay, yes."

OOO

For here the lover and killer are mingled who had one body and one heart.  
- _Vergissmeinnicht_, Keith Douglas (1943)

14th July 1995

He watches as his father deals with Borgins, once in a while turning just the slightest to raise an amused eyebrow in his direction, and he stifles his own laughter, knowing that Father, of course, fully intended to use Borgins, despite the latter's efforts for it to be the other way around.

He himself now bends down, and examines the soft velvety material that has been laid carefully across the counter, folded and ready to be wrapped, its colour flowing freely between dark green and mottled silver. An Invisbility cloak, for his birthday on the thirty-first. His heart content and settled, at least for the moment, for he is, after all, getting something befitting of himself -- and it is, of course, something that he wants. Father always made sure to tell him of his birthday presents, watching his expression to see if he wants it. All he has to do was to lift his eyebrows in doubt, and Father will nod, and the present will be dismissed immediately. They have an understanding in that. Whenever Father is displeased with him, all he needs to do was to turn away from him, just the slightest of motions, and Draco will know, instantly, his transgression.

This understanding hasn't always been in place, of course. It has only begun around his twelfth birthday, and both father and son are suitably satisfied with it, though in common company they voice some things aloud for the better comfort of their associates. Draco knows that his mother does not feel entirely pleased with this arrangement, and he has seen her more and more so temperamental, indulging in fits of violence, both verbal and physical. But -- strangely, he cares not. Not really. The woman hasn't dared touch him.

And Father hasn't made any move to placate his mother, and so Draco's heart is content and settled.

OOO

6th June 1996

His breath coming short and hurried, belaboured, he lowers himself and his broom slightly, letting it glide just a few feet above the thick undergrowth of the deceptively quiet Malfoy forest, too low for any aerial attack, too high for any ground attack.

Draco is always cautious, even when his skin is smarting violet and bleeding red and black, even when the Manor he has known all his life has just been taken over by overgrown Aurors and even when his mother has conveniently escaped the country (and for all he knows, which he now knows accounts for nothing, the continent).

But of course. It is a Malfoy thing to do, if not entirely thoughtless enough for a Black; Father will be most proud.

Father. A wet mist takes over Draco's silver eyes, clouding his vision. Foreign.

His fine-boned hands shake slightly; his head is starting to pulsate with the weight of his tears, the loss, or should he say the losses...of what? He is not sure anymore.

Did it feel like this, when one started going insane? To be sane enough to think of protecting your physical body, but to lose whatever semblance of what you thought you knew? What you thought you believed in?

What did I think?

Or did I ever think?

Or was I just told, and I never thought, and now I've forgotten?

Draco retches suddenly, a horrid revulsion overtaking his previous tangle of emotions, whatever they were. Then abruptly all he wants to do was laugh, and he does.

It is not a pleasant laugh, but Draco does not ever remember any pleasant laughter ever issuing from his lips, not without Father; it is a bitter laugh. Or a laugh that is filled with bitterness. Is there a difference?

Draco doesn't know.

But then that might just have something to do with the fact that he obviously knows nothing.

Blackness is surrounding him; he knows not what it is. But of course he knows not what it is. Maybe it is night. Maybe it is the broad leaves of the deciduous trees around him, now in full mocking glory. Maybe it is just death.

A fitting end to his ignorance.

A half-smile plays on Draco Malfoy's lips, and his last coherent thought is that, should he die, at least no one will find him looking like this.

OOO

6th June 1996

She lowers herself, carefully, into the small white bathtub, cramped, unflinching in its claustrophobic properties. She winces a little, because as usual the water is a little too hot. The water here is always a little too extreme, and she hates that it attacks her senses with such a wanton lack of mercy.

Too bright, too immediate, too real. Everything has been like this, since Sirius's Death.

She watches the white skin marred by freckles and cuts and bruises and scars and leftover insect bites from past days and years, sometimes reminders of past fun and always reminders of past pain. She doesn't like her skin, thinking it a map of too many words, a storyboard too eloquent, telling too much of how she has lived her past fifteen years, because for some reason she has never managed to heal properly. Even the scratches of four years ago are beige and silver on the side of her heels, twisting around the back of her ankles. She glances down, at the heavy black and silver pendant hanging from the silver chain around her neck, and a warmth, but not a comfortable one, develops from her cheeks. Once Michael had absentmindedly fingered the chain, and the reaction had been immediate.

She closes her eyes. She had had to Obliviate him, and after that, well, after that, everyone knows what can only possibly happen after that. She hasn't been able to look Michael truthfully in the eye, and she has only been able to act the hypocrite, hiding her guilt with resentment, and she watches as Michael wilts at her glare, in the belief that he has been untoward towards her, overtly forward, and that she had Obliviated him -- rightfully, too -- because of that. He now thinks he doesn't want to remember, because he is ashamed of himself for something he did not do.

Michael was -- is -- a good person.

Sometimes she hates herself.

Towards the end of the school year she had been looking at Michael when he was not looking at her, and she still imagined to see the light bruises across his face where she -- and Tom's pendant, too, please let it be Tom's pendant as well -- had hurt him.

If anything so that she can at least let her conscience rest.

OOO

A/N: This is an updated version of my past WIP fic under the author's name DamnedWellNeurotic, previously named Whimsically Ginny. If you do think that this is a promising enough start, please do review, as that would be greatly appreciated. :D


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